It’s not Harman and co. the media should be after but Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary, who cunningly escaped justice by dying over a decade ago.

Unlike Jimmy Savile whose “victims” (alleged victims, actually, despite increasingly injudicious assertions to the contrary by people who ought to know better, including the politically ambitious former DPP Sir Keir Starmer) numbered only in the hundreds, Jenkins was responsible for policies that affected millions, ushering in the “permissive society” of the 1970s that was responsible for all manner of evils if you believe the likes of Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens – and many presumably do, judging by the sustained ferocity of the campaign against the radicalism of those times in sister paper the Daily Mail this past week.

The “evils” for which Jenkins – possibly the greatest reforming Home Secretary ever – was personally responsible included a stupendous swathe of landmark measures: abolition of the death penalty, liberalisation of the abortion law, the end of theatre censorship, introduction of a defence of literary merit into the law on obscene publications, decriminalization of homosexuality between consenting adult males. Jenkins saw the permissive society as a civilized society. Unlike today’s authoritarian Labour hierarchy who seem happy only when they are banning something, Jenkins was a socialist who believed in freedom. In terms of the French revolutionary slogan, he took liberty as seriously as equality – a rare combination given that these ideals are often seen as in tension with each other.

Jenkins also set the tone at the Home Office for a generation. In 1979, three years after his departure to become President of the European Commission, his former department of state published Sexual Offences, Consent and Sentencing (Home Office Research Study No. 54). It took the recognition of “under-age” consent seriously, using the term “partners” rather than “victims”.

Also – and this will raise eyebrows but I said it way back in 1980 in my book Paedophilia the Radical Case – we had it on reliable authority that Jenkins personally read PIE’s evidence to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee on the age of consent and that our proposals for law reform caught his imagination. He is said to have been impressed but was of the opinion that politically “it hasn’t a hope in hell”.

Jenkins had himself been politically able to encourage thinking that was only marginally less radical than ours, though, thanks to intellectual developments in the previous decades, including the great surveys by Alfred Kinsey which had demonstrated that children can and do behave sexually, including experiencing sexual orgasm from infancy onwards. And, as Jon Henley pointed out in the Guardian in 2001, French thinkers had helped set the pace too:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the… French health and education ministers Bernard Kouchner and Jack Lang were among the signatories of petitions in the 1970s calling for paedophilia to be decriminalised, it emerged….

A number of extraordinary documents have surfaced – in the wake of accusations of possible child sex abuse against the former student revolutionary Danny Cohn-Bendit that are forcing France’s intellectuals to confront the values of the May 1968 revolution and its aftermath, a period that witnessed probably the biggest change in sexual behaviour in recorded history.

The petitions were issued after a 1977 trial that saw three men jailed for non-violent sex offences against children aged 12 and 13.

“Three years in prison for caresses and kisses: enough is enough,” one petition, signed by Mr Kouchner and Mr Lang, said. “French law recognises in 12- and 13-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish,” said a second petition signed by Sartre and De Beauvoir, along with fellow intellectuals Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida; a leading child psychologist, Franoise Dolto; and writers Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Louis Aragon. “But it rejects such a capacity when the child’s emotional and sexual life is concerned. It should acknowledge the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose.”

By the early 1970s the gay liberation movement was in full swing in the UK and campaigning organisations such as the Gay Liberation Front, and even the more conservative Campaign for Homosexual Equality, did not in those days entirely set their face against paedophilia. It was a time for debate, in which many felt that the now vilified Paedophile Information Exchange was in the vanguard of change because its policies promised to set children free as well as the adults attracted to them.

It was into these heady circumstances, which now seem so distant and exotic, that Mesdames Hewitt and Harman leapt when they decided to join the then very trendy National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL). I believe they thought the job would make a promising platform from which to launch careers as Labour party politicians. I say this with the benefit of hindsight, knowing now what I did not know at the time, namely that they would both become cabinet ministers in Labour governments. Harriet Harman is now Deputy Leader of the Labour party and her husband, trade unionist Jack Dromey, who also served with the NCCL in the 1970s, became Labour’s Treasurer.

For a week or so now this trio has been under immense, sustained, pressure from the Daily Mail and other media to explain why they worked with an organisation that had its own radical policy on sexual law reform, including lowering the age of consent to 14 (or 10, “provided it is demonstrated that consent was clearly given by the child”) and why they allowed the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), castigated by the media as a “vile”, “perverted”, etc. organisation of “predatory paedophiles” to remain affiliated to the NCCL.

The truth of the matter is that none of these three was at all enthusiastic about PIE’s involvement. I know because I was a regular participant in meetings of the NCCL’s gay rights sub-committee in the late 1970s, representing PIE. None of the trio ever attended a meeting of that committee during the sessions I attended and I have no direct evidence of what they thought about PIE. The talk reaching me at the time, though, suggested that they were hostile to PIE, not supportive. To that extent, current Labour leader Ed Miliband is right to support his deputy, as he has done, against any suggestion that she (or indeed the other two) ever actively worked to promote “paedophile rights”.

Not that PIE itself campaigned for any “right” of paedophiles to have sex with children, as the media love to insinuate. Our aim was sexual self-determination for all, regardless of age. The realisation of this aim would merely have legalised adult-child sexual acts in the event of a child being a willing partner.

Of course, I would greatly prefer Miliband to be boldly radical, like Roy Jenkins, but that is a hopeless proposition in the current climate of opinion. It seems to me that in the very different atmosphere of the 1970s Hewitt, Harman and Dromey made a very different calculation. While they did not like PIE and did nothing to support our objectives, they were afraid of appearing insufficiently “right on”; consequently they were nothing like as strenuous and public in their efforts to distance themselves from PIE as they are now claiming. Dromey, in particular, is quoted in the Mail as saying “During my time on the NCCL executive, I was at the forefront of repeated public condemnations of PIE and their despicable views.” That’s news to me, and the Mail said it was unable to locate any such public statements. Maybe by “public” he meant imprecations muttered to cronies at his local pub. I do not know what they did behind the scenes to combat the prevailing radical mood but I do know that they allowed me – or permitted NCCL to allow me – to continue attending the gay rights sub-committee during their watch. My presence was never challenged. I always felt welcome. Eventually, I resigned as Chair of PIE when I was facing a charge of conspiracy to corrupt public morals. That was the logical time to end my attendance at NCCL meetings.

I am scribbling this at midnight because my entire day has been taken up with variously fending off and succumbing to approaches by the media – the Mail (again), the Sun, ITN, BBC (three or four different people throughout the day), the Guardian. Have I missed anyone? Probably, it’s been frenetic. Most of them seemed interested in absolutely nothing beyond the role played by the Labour trio in relation to PIE in the 1970s. The wider context appeared to concern them not one jot.

I should just mention Andrew Gilligan’s piece for the Daily Telegraph a few days ago though, as this was a bit different (“The ‘right’ to sleep with children was one ‘civil liberty’ that NCCL supported”, 21 Feb.). Remember Gilligan? He’s the guy who used to work for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme who famously made a broadcast in May 2003 in which he claimed that the British Government had “sexed up” a report in order to exaggerate the WMD capabilities of Saddam Hussein. He resigned from the BBC in 2004, in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, after Lord Hutton questioned the reliability of his evidence. In the view of many (including me) he has since been vindicated.

Not that I’m enthusiastic about his report on PIE, for which he trawled through Paedophilia the Radical Case in order to rip my words out of context in a highly unsympathetic way. It was an interesting piece, though, not least for this claim:

PIE’s members, mostly educated and middle-class, were good at finding “progressive” academics – some useful idiots, others rather more sinister – to fight their cause.

I emailed him today (sorry, yesterday, as I’m now well past midnight) to ask which of these academics he regards as idiots and which as sinister – and why. No response yet, but he’s known to be nocturnal so he might fire off a reply about 3am!

Like this:

The Itaipu Dam, which I visited this week, was dubbed one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers 20 years ago, following the project’s opening a decade earlier in 1984.

I agree. It is unquestionably an immense and marvellous engineering triumph, generating sufficient hydro-electric power to supply nearly 20% of Brazil’s electricity and 90% of Paraguay’s, drawing on a vast quantity of water from the Parana River that marks the border between the two countries. In terms of electricity generated, it still beats the mighty Three Gorges Dam in China.

It also generates extraordinary statistics: the overflow slipway is capable of carrying 40 times the water volume of the nearby Iguacu Falls, which is itself the world’s second biggest waterfall by volume of water – and also a tremendous spectacle, as I can now personally attest. The amount of concrete used would be enough to build 210 football stadiums the size of the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, the iron and steel used would allow for the construction of 380 Eiffel Towers. It is also the biggest… well, you get the idea. Heretic TOC is not a gee whiz Big Stuff site, so I’ll spare you the full verbal tour.

I will just mention one aspect of the generally excellent tour I was given, though: an introductory video shown to visitors. This, too, in its way, was also one of the Wonders of the Modern World, conveying the most impressively comprehensive propaganda to which I have ever personally been subjected: it surely has to be considered right up there with the works of Goebbels and his equivalents in the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao.

How so? Well, first there was the truly epic story of the dam’s construction, with a barrage of all those impressive and no doubt accurate statistics. But then we were treated to an increasingly grandiose sequence of wider claims: the dam has been the catalyst for scientific and medical research; it is to be the site of a new international university; it has inspired the development of an electric car; it has been the focus of educational projects from primary school level to adult literary; it benefits the indigenous tribal populations; it is fostering biological diversity, working towards international environmental targets, combating climate change. It is even – wait for it – committed to ending the sexual abuse of children! A dam, would you believe, an immense pile of concrete and rocks, has taken upon itself to protect the little ones!

Quite how the dam proposes to achieve this aim was never spelt out but I suppose it could imitate the god of the Israelites, unleashing a tsunami down that mighty slipway to flood the cities of the plain beneath, drowning all the abusers (and all the “protected” children!), sealing their fate like that of the sinners in Sodom and Gomorrah!

I am reliably informed by a long-time American expat here who has excellent Portuguese that the Brazilian media these days are just as crazily dominated by anti-CSA propaganda as in the Anglophone world. Arguably it is even worse. I doubt, for instance, that a government information film in Britain about, say, a new nuclear power programme would mention CSA. Neither do we see anti-CSA posters in public squares, as I have here in Brazil.

When cultural imperialism gathers momentum, it seems, its expression can be even more extreme than the original source, as though trying to outdo its tutors. A similar phenomenon occurred after British missionaries went to Africa in the 19th century, where they preached against native homosexual practices that had long been culturally accepted. The Christian churches in the effected countries are now virulently ant-gay, even though the mother church back in England has changed completely and is now pro-gay!

A key feature of propaganda like the Itaipu film, of course, is that it diverts attention from unwelcome truths, in an exercise as consciously and carefully engineered as the initial diversion of the river being dammed. Boasting about work to promote biological diversity and so forth distracts from considering all the diversity lost under the vast new reservoir created by the dam; while you’re blathering on about CSA you’re not mentioning the ten thousand people who lost their homes under the water; and you can even get away with saying not a word about the extraordinary environmental vandalism this particular dam project entailed. Its creation necessitated drowning the Guaíra Falls, which had been the world’s largest waterfall by volume (though Niagara might contest this). The Brazilian government liquidated (literally!) the Guaíra Falls National Park, and dynamited the submerged rock face where the falls had been in order to foil any future attempt at restoration.

I say all this simply because I am in Brazil at the moment. Fellow Anglophone heretics will no doubt be reminded of CSA’s usefulness to our own governments: when they have something to hide (which is all too often!) they can always promote a grotesquely ill-thought out, non-evidence-based, crackdown against CSA and “paedophilia”.

I see no point in responding, as anything I say would merely serve as another angle to keep the story going.

Not that they need my help. They have already run the story in various versions before, and will no doubt do so again at the slightest excuse, whether they have anything new to say or not. They know what keeps their punters happy, so they cannot be accused of incompetence in terms of generating sales. However, so far as this particular repetitious saga is concerned they are beginning to resemble the Daily Express, which constantly recycles a handful of stories (death of Princess Diana, disappeared toddler Madeleine McCann, miracle cure for arthritis, stormy weather ahead) to its elderly readership, who are presumably so far gone in senility they cannot remember they read the same thing only a few days before.

The Mail can take the downmarket Express route if they wish. It may be successful in sales terms, but it is hardly a recipe for respected journalism.

As slums go, the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro is remarkably pretty, even glamorous. The stinking open sewers, garbage-strewn alleys and tumbledown shacks are doubtless much like those in many hundreds of such favelas, home to almost a quarter of the city’s population of over six million.

But Santa Marta is special. One thing that makes it so, in the mantra of the real estate dealers, is “location, location, location”. Unlike the vast, sprawling, nondescript favelas of industrial north Rio, Santa Marta lies in the favoured south, only a couple of Metro stations away from well-heeled Copacabana, with its famous beach. Actually, Santa Marta doesn’t really “lie” anywhere. Instead, it clings precariously to a steep and, as it were, “holy” hillside, directly beneath Rio’s truly most iconic feature – tourists make thousands of “icons” of it every day – the huge and imposing mountain-top statue of Christ the Redeemer, whose open arms embrace the city.

Perhaps this special location lay behind the decision to use Santa Marta for filming the video of Michael Jackson’s song “They don’t really care about us” in 1995. As many here will be aware, the shoot featured local kids (surprise, surprise!) singing and dancing along with Jackson. He was accused at the time of exploiting their poverty, which may be true. But it is also true that the massive worldwide publicity generated by the event meant that suddenly, the image-conscious Brazilian authorities – then bidding for the World Cup and Olympics that are finally now coming their way ­– started caring about Santa Marta. Artists were commissioned to beautify the place with murals; the more prominent houses were painted in bright, cheerful colours. More practically, a cable car was built, so that favela dwellers would no longer have to sweat their way to the top; concrete steps replaced slippery mud banks; railings were installed so that kids would no longer tumble and hurt themselves.

Jon, my guide when I visited the favela a few days ago, testified personally to the importance of this last improvement. A Santa Marta resident all his life, when he was little he fell off an unguarded sheer drop, badly injuring his back.

“I still have the scars to prove it,” he told me, in good English learned not in school but from the internet and talking with tourists.

As the author of a book on Michael Jackson (and his boys), I was particularly keen to explore the superstar’s connection with the favela. Not that Jon would have let it pass unnoticed: a visit to what has become a Jackson “shrine” is a highlight of his tour. The Jackson area includes a balcony with a statue of the late great in an open-armed gesture, appearing to – ahem – embrace the city below, rather like Jesus. Accused in his lifetime of presenting himself as a messiah (not the only allegation he faced, of course) at least he cannot be blamed for this little excess.

Little, indeed, is the operative word here. The statue is tiny, less than life-size. By contrast, Jackson promoted his History album with a 60-foot statue of himself, floated upright on a barge down the River Thames, in London. Now that was a statue fit for a god!

Why all this is expected to be of interest to readers of Heretic TOC is a bit obscure, I confess. My interest in Jackson is primarily rooted in his boy-love rather than his over-the-top self-presentation or the way his fans idolised him. Unsurprisingly, there was not a trace of evidence in Santa Marta that I could find in my brief visit to suggest any BL connection, other than the faint echoes discernible from the video itself – which was played to me in the inevitable souvenir shop and which I felt obliged to buy. Oh, yes, there is another thing I nearly forgot to mention: Michael had a couple of young boys in his entourage, so he wasn’t exactly short of company!

What I’m trying to do, I suppose, in a roundabout way, is to let y’all know that Heretic TOC is on vacation in Brazil right now, escaping the horrible wet, windy, grey English winter for a few weeks. After a very agreeable week spent in Rio seeing all the usual tourist sights, I will soon be off hiking deep in the interior. I expect this will be all about mountains, rivers, waterfalls and valleys rather than a “heretic” thing, so it is entirely possible my next blog won’t even mention Brazil, although it will probably be written in this country.

I should not leave the favela theme, though, without some acknowledgement of a much bigger issue than Michael Jackson’s fleeting presence long ago. Apart from poverty, which is still the defining feature of favela life for many, although it could be worse – satellite TV dishes festoon the rooftops – violence has also been endemic in these communities, as those familiar with the film City of God will be aware.

That has changed for the better quite a bit in recent years, thanks to police “pacification” programmes: one by one, dozens of favelas, starting with Santa Marta itself in 2008, have been subjected to intensive policing, resulting in the expulsion of the criminal gangs that used to rule the roost, dominating entire communities not just the drug scene. Without such pacification I could not have entered Santa Marta without severe risk of being intimidated and robbed.

The price of such victories has been high, though. The police in Brazil are often accused of brutality, the latest allegations arising from their handling in recent days of demonstrations against the World Cup ­– a popular protest despite the country’s fabled love of football, because people would prefer to see the money go on decent public services, especially in education and health provision.

But I digress. The allegations have often all too clearly been true, although a culture of impunity means police officers are very seldom held to account for actions that include outright torture and murder of suspects, with even mass killings not unknown. Not so long ago, Human Rights Watch reported over 3,000 deaths annually from police violence in Brazil. In one appalling incident, the Candelária church massacre of 1993, eight minors were killed by the police, including two boys aged 14, one 13 and one 11.

Basically these kids, and others like them in many cities, have been treated like vermin who need to be exterminated in order to “cleanse” the streets, making them safe for the prosperous classes who don’t like their pockets picked by Dickensian gangs of urchins, or having their stores robbed – and who, in their respectability, don’t much care for kids to be hanging around plying a trade as prostitutes either.

Pacification, then, has its agreeable side, as I discovered: it is good to stroll about in a relaxed, crime-free environment. But the flip side has been ugly and vicious in the extreme. And the favelas have arguably been not just pacified but stultified. When the law rides into town a lot of the colour and the fun rides out!

P.S. Director Spike Lee also shot part of his Jackson video in the city of Salvador, where I am staying right now. This location was in the historic district of Pelourinho, originally a slave market. Naturally, I plan to pay a visit!

N.B. For one week, starting on Monday 10 February, I expect to be hiking in remote places away from any internet connections. Accordingly, I will be unable to approve and posts your comments in this period. So, if you have anything to say about this or other H-TOC blogs, get in quickly!